


Vengeful Creatures

by crimson_adder



Series: men, monsters, miracles [2]
Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman, Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Mythology - Freeform, References to Norse Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 12:14:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4019374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimson_adder/pseuds/crimson_adder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts after the ice. Steve Rogers wakes up and a man offers him a job as a personal bodyguard. It’s as good as any other.</p><p>The man he's supposed to protect though, seems intent on starting a war.</p><p> </p><p>(something in between an AU of Avengers set in the American Gods world, and a retelling of American Gods with Avengers characters.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vengeful Creatures

**Author's Note:**

> okay, wow. this has been sitting in my docs since I finished the last one.
> 
> belligerently crossing over The Avengers and American Gods again, in a totally different way [ than last time.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1104968) because I need to. always. it's sort of like, less of a crossover than the last one, and more like an aggressive smashing together of two very disparate realms with a few overlapping points. until they submit and cry.
> 
> anyway, it's not remotely done despite what it says on the tin, but I need to get it out there or it'll just get nasty, so I'm throwing it at the internet to see if it sticks.
> 
> so there.

\-----------------------------------------------

The last thing he remembered was ice.

Then he woke up to strange faces and strange voices in a hospital room filled with strange machines. The on-duty nurse took his blood pressure and pushed some buttons, speaking a foreign language in a soothing, motherly tone.

It took him several minutes to realize he should start panicking; when he did, and the machines started wailing, the nurse left in a rush and came back with a tall female doctor.

"Good morning," she said. "I am Doctor Katrine Olsen. Maliina says you speak English; are you Canadian or American?" She had a round face and long black hair.

"I'm. No, I'm American. Where am I?"

"You are in Queen Ingrid's Hospital. Nuuk, in Greenland. What is your name?"

"Steve. Rogers," he said. He tried to smile, but everything felt wrong, so he stopped. It had probably looked weird anyway.

"Well Steve," said Doctor Olsen. "It's nice to meet you. You've been asleep for a long time."

They fed him breakfast. When he asked, no one knew who Captain America was. The nurses, several of whom spoke English, had never heard of the Howling Commandos. They assigned him a therapist, Doctor Larsen, a man with watery eyes and a stack of legal notepads, who sat next to his bed and encouraged him to open up about his feelings.

The room he had been assigned was empty but for him. It had three other beds though, and curtains sectioning off different areas, but there was no one to talk to but shadows. The walls were painted pale blue, which made the soft peach of the blankets seem warmer, and the shining metal of the instruments that beeped around him feel even more distant and cold.

They told him he'd been found by fishermen, drifting and hypothermic. They told him it was 2011.

It was easier to believe them than to figure out why they would lie. He stopped trying to get someone to contact Peggy.

Steve spent three days recovering feeling in his extremities. The skin of his fingers felt thick and dead, and Doctor Olsen pricked him and prodded and poked him until she made a lasting impression, and then she shuffled him out of bed to stand on his own feet again. Two days on crutches, everyone terribly impressed and also slightly baffled at his recovery rate, and he walked down the hall to the vending machines all by himself. He didn't have any money though, so all he did was take a measure of all the snacks that he didn't recognize.

They still had pretzels in the future. And coffee. That was something.

Nothing he saw was even remotely familiar.

Steve's body felt vibrant, jittery, like there was a charge in the air. He watched the clouds gathering and dispersing outside his window and waited for a storm to break.

Doctor Larsen was an irritating therapist, who spent hours waiting for him to talk through his emotions. Steve didn't know how to tell him that he'd woken up past his own life expectancy, didn't know the first thing about the world beyond the walls of his hospital room. He'd seen shell-shocked soldiers before though, kids and old men with wide eyes, jumping at noises and ghosts and their own regrets. It was easier to talk about that than the 70 years between him and those men.

More than that, Steve concentrated on reteaching his fingers how to hold a pencil, and focused on the tingling in his toes until his feet stopped cramping every time he flexed, and he tried not to think about everyone he'd lost.

He made the effort to be nice, when he wasn't panicking, and the nurses all liked him.

After eight days in the hospital, Steve felt as good as he thought he'd ever feel again. Hollow, perhaps, but whole. 

It was starting to rain, the clouds that had been hanging over Nuuk pattering down, and pale, pale grey. The nervous energy he'd felt hadn't dissipated. This wasn't the storm he was waiting for.

Steve asked Doctor Olsen about going home.

"Well," she said, "You are, remarkably, physically fine. Not even lingering frostbite damage. We don't have any reason to keep you if you want to go. Where would you go?"

"Brooklyn. New York. I was born there, lived there most of my life."

"Do you have family there?"

Steve shook his head. He didn't want to, but he couldn't be bothered to lie. "I don't know. I think I lost most of everyone I knew."

"Do you have any money?" asked Doctor Olsen, checking her clipboard and writing something down. 

He hadn't had to think about money in months. Well, decades. Army pay, film residuals, comic book sales, and the sponsorship of the US Government. He wondered if he still had a bank account. 

Doctor Olsen apparently read the expression on his face. "We'll figure something out," she said, putting a comforting hand on his arm. "Is there anyone you might be able to call?"

The last time he'd used a telephone, it had a rotary dial. He’d seen what they called telephones these days; Nurse Maliina had showed him photos of her new baby.

"No. There's no one."

On the ninth day since he'd woken up, Jørgen, the morning nurse, rapped at the door frame and leaned his head in.

The rain had turned into freezing sleet overnight, ice building up in patter marks against the glass of Steve's window. The chill had seeped into his room in the dark, making it difficult to sleep. He had dreamt about cliffs of snow and ice and falling and falling.

"You have a visitor, Mr Rogers," Jørgen announced. 

Steve's eggs slipped off his fork with a _plop_. 

"I do? I mean. Who?"

Jørgen shrugged, and gestured with his head to the hallway. 

"Well, I'm. Sure, I'll see them," said Steve. "I guess. Who is it?" But Jørgen was already gone.

The man who entered was smiling politely, and looked positively benign. He had mousy hair, a receding hairline, and a solid, steady frame. He wore a suit.

"Good morning," said the man in the suit. He spoke with a mild, Northeast American accent.

"Hi," said Steve. He fumbled his fork, which he'd forgotten about, and set it carefully on the side of his plastic plate.

"How are you feeling?" asked the man. He smiled with mild, American reassurance. "On your way to a full recovery, I hope?"

"I'm doing quite well, sir." He didn't mean to add the honorific, but something about the man seemed to say Government Agency. Vaguely and insistently.

"Call me Mr. Coal." The man in the suit smiled a terrifically bland smile. "I'd like to offer you a job, Captain."

It was the first time anyone had called him by his rank since he'd woken up. It wasn't as reassuring as he'd thought it would be.

Mr Coal sat down without waiting for an invitation, in the small plastic chair next to Steve's hospital bed. He adjusted the lines of his black suit then folded his hands in his lap. "Everyone you know -- everything you knew," he said, matter-of-factly, "is gone; the apartment where you used to live has been renovated into a single family home, and has been passed on through several different occupants. Your old block is now a community of young urban professionals and cupcake shops. There is nothing left for you."

Steve knew that. In a way. Somewhere shunted off to the side, where he could pretend to ignore it for a little while longer.

Still he paled to hear it out loud. He felt disconcerted, unmoored, and very much like he was losing track of the conversation.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"We know about you," said Mr Coal. "We're big fans of your work."

Steve frowned. "I'm sorry but, who's 'we'?"

"We're with the Government. And we want you, Captain America."

"I'm just a kid from Brooklyn."

Mr Coal's smile grew more unnerving with each quirk of his lips.

"Oh no. Captain, you're much more than that."

"I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry, but I just want to go home."

"We can get you home."

Steve bit the inside of his cheek, and wondered if he could use this to his advantage. "If you get me home, I'll consider your proposal," he said, cautiously. 

Mr Coal grinned, full out, showing his teeth; it was about as reassuring this time as a chimpanzee grinning from behind bars. He held out his hand for Steve to shake. "That's all we ask for," he said.

He left, then, without another word.

When Doctor Olsen visited later that day, she told him that the US Embassy in Greenland had called to announce they would fund his return flight to New York, and he could leave at his earliest convenience.

Steve was given a mismatched assortment of civilian clothes from the lost and found. Thick denim pants, too tight in the thighs, and not quite as tall as he needed them to be, belted; an old T-shirt and a long sleeved henley, and a flannel button down for warmth. Nurse Ane convinced him to wear the T-shirt over the henley, which made him feel slightly inside out.

Jørgen had given up the nice leather bomber jacket he'd scrounged from the lost and found with only a minimum of resentment, on account of Steve's shoulders being too broad to fit any of the others. It wasn't actually from the 1940's, but it was styled to recall the era, and painfully familiar. Since the storm was still plowing Nuuk with icy rains and cold air, though, Steve couldn't bring himself to refuse, even though he kind of wanted to.

Before he left, Doctor Olsen stopped by his room. She had a large plastic bag with his name and room number written on it in Sharpie.

"These are yours, Mr Rogers," she said. "I'm glad to get a chance to give them back to you."

Steve recognized the weight and shape of his shield inside the thin bag. There were a few other things that rattled and clanked against the metal, but they were secondary. 

His shield. His _shield_. He hadn't thought there would be anything else to survive the crash, but if anything had, it would have been Howard's shield.

He wanted to throw it. Catch it. He wanted to protect people with it.

Storm an enemy base, maybe.

Something familiar.

Instead he choked on the words in his throat as he tried to thank Doctor Olsen.

Doctor Olsen looked at him intently. "Things are going to be difficult for you Steve. Adjustment after a traumatic experience is never easy, especially with such an unusual case as yours. I wish you the best."

The taxi to the airport was fine. 

The airport was not.

Steve stood against the glass of the windows, feeling like he'd forgotten to ask something extremely important about his trip home. Like how he was going to get there, preferably without crying.

At the International Flights counter, when the woman asked for his I.D., it occurred to Steve that he had been, ostensibly, dead for seventy years. Even if he still had his old dog tags, even if they counted as identification, somewhere out there was a gravestone with his name on it.

There wouldn't have been a body, but there often wasn't in war.

At least his mother wouldn't have had to attend his funeral. Maybe Peggy had; Howard. Colonel Phillips, if he could make it, but he probably would have sent his condolences in a politically worded letter.

Also, he didn't have any I.D. and the woman was starting to look at him strangely. 

Steve patted his pockets helplessly, which wouldn’t have done any good even if he did have identification on him. The pockets were so _tight_. "I - I'm sorry. Shit. I don't - "

Before he could stumble his way any further, the phone rang, and the woman said "You look for that; Hello, Nuuk International Airport?" She listened for a moment, while Steve despaired, and then she stiffened abruptly, and gave him a sharp, assessing look. She slipped the mouthpiece onto her cheek.

"What's your full name, sir?"

"Steven Grant Rogers."

She wedged the phone between her ear and her shoulder and started tapping at the typewriter in front of her.

"Birthday?"

"July 4, uh… 1920."

"Rank and Identification Number?"

"Well, Captain? I.D. 253-74-1-A"

The woman gave him the baleful glare specific to the professional asked to go outside the bounds of their work by someone higher-up than they are. She continued clacking on her typewriter for several minutes, saying things in Greenlandic to the other half of the phone conversation, and finally hung up with a sign.

"There's a flight to Ottawa, Canada in two hours, and a connecting flight to New York JFK at 5 p.m. Your flight's been paid for by a third party. Do you have any bags to check?"

"No. This?" The knapsack that Maliina had found for him was big enough to hold his shield, but barely. The fabric was completely distorted around the edges and the seams were strained in several places.

"Does it have any weapons in it?" Steve blinked innocently and shook his head very slowly. "You don't need to check that."

"Then that's all I have."

The woman pressed several buttons and a white rectangle of flimsy paper slipped out of the side of the counter. She withdrew a bright orange marker, circled several things, and pointed him in the direction of a security guard, who was approaching.

"Have a nice flight, Captain Rogers. Henrik will show you the way to your gate."

The path that Henrik the security guard led Steve on was not the path anyone else was following. He didn't stand in line, he didn't have to show any more identification, and he didn't have to walk through the metal gates or put his things on the conveyor belt. 

He didn't even have to take his shoes off, which apparently people did in airports these days. There were whole groups of people standing in line in their socks, wrestling out of their jackets as they shuffled along across the linoleum floor.

Instead, Henrik the security guard opened a side door with a key, and Steve followed him down several empty beige hallways, past a few locked offices, and out the other end back into the terminal.

"Gate 30," Henrik pointed. "Follow that sign to the end of the hall, turn left; very last terminal. It'll be on your left."

Steve sat on the tiny leather row of seats and held his shield to his chest, very, very tightly. 

There was another flight between his arrival and his departure; heading to Reykjavik. The crowd (it was not a very large crowd) thinned, disappeared, and returned; same strangers, different faces, each occupied in their own worlds. Steve watched them for a while. 

People hadn’t changed much in 70 years. Families were still families. 

They called for boarding on flight 42 to Ottawa. Steve's number was called. He did not get up. He waited, until everyone in the area had gone through, and he couldn't delay any longer, before he sidled up to the check-in desk. The man took his piece of paper, ran it under a red laser beam. The desk made a beep, and the man nodded him past.

It was a very small plane. Two seats on each side, fifteen rows going back. 

Steve sat in his assigned seat, and tried to fit his legs in the narrow footwell. He looked out the window. There was no one sitting next to him; about a quarter of the seats were empty. 

He realized he was still holding his shield. He unbuckled his seatbelt again, struggled out of the tiny leg space, and fought to cram the unyielding knapsack into the overhead storage. He dropped someone else’s bag, caught it, jostled them in together, and generally made a great big mess of it. People were starting to stare.

A stewardess was waiting for Steve when he finally folded himself back into the seat, slightly breathless and overwhelmed. She told him to sit down and buckle up, as they were about to depart.

The take off was rainy, but uneventful. It felt like the plane had only just leveled out above the clouds before it was tilting nose down again and descending into Canada.

Steve closed his eyes and held his breath. The plane landed with a bump, and it was raining again. The storm was bigger on the mainland, thick and heavy in the air.

His second flight wasn’t for several more hours, and he found his new terminal easily enough; there were signs -- not enough, but he figured it out. Steve sat, and watched people.

He fell asleep, his forehead resting on his shield. The intercom woke him up, and he got on his next flight.

It felt like he hadn’t actually made it out of the ocean, but was struggling along underwater, ears deadened and eyes blind in the dark, as he groped for air and his mind made up stories to pretend it would all be alright.

Steve’s new seat assignment put him next to a tall white man with sharp eyes. The man was reading a newspaper; when Steve sat down, awkward and too big for the low space beneath the bulkhead, his gaze flicked up, away, and back.

The man began to smirk.

“Well, well,” said the tall man. Despite the fact that he sat as high in his seat as Steve, he didn’t look nearly as cramped as Steve felt. “It’s about time. Good to see you up and about.”

“What?”

“Are you ready? This will be a bumpy flight,” the man said. He had an accent that wasn’t familiar to Steve: it sounded British, but slightly off, with flatter vowels.

“I - what?”

The man tilted his head to the tiny window, where black clouds were lurking to the south. “Storm. There’s going to be some turbulence. You’re not afraid of flying, are you? Or is it falling?”

Steve stared at the man. The man smirked again, and turned back to his newspaper.

A stewardess tapped Steve on the arm and told him to buckle his seatbelt, because they were about to take off. 

They did take off in a moment, then the stewardess was back asking if he would like a drink.

Steve shook his head, no. The man beside him leaned in close, his shoulder brushing Steve’s coat, and said “Jack Daniels, if you don’t mind,” in a low rumble.

"Of course," said the stewardess, turning faintly pink. "I'll be right back with that."

The man smiled slow and dirty. Steve felt extremely uncomfortable.

The stewardess hurried off, glancing back over her shoulder once, and the man turned to Steve.

“So, business or pleasure? New York. What are you going to do there?”

“Uh, I’m just going home,” said Steve.

“And where is home?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Hmm. But it hasn’t been for a long time, has it? You know, you look horribly familiar,” he continued before Steve could process his last remark.

“I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

“No, no. Oh! I know. You look like Captain America.”

Steve froze.

The man leered, showing straight, white teeth. His lips, when Steve looked at them, were scarred; small gouges that twisted the lines of his mouth. “Yes, that’s it. Great hero from World War II? Went down in the Arctic sea. Where was he from. Brooklyn, wasn’t it?” 

Abruptly, he dropped all pretense. “I’ve got a job for you, Captain.”

Steve took a closer look at the man. He was wearing a nice suit, soft dark charcoal in color, and a better quality than Mr. Coal’s from the hospital. His hair was swept back, black and shiny, and his narrow cheeks seemed to indicate a hunger that Steve was deeply uncomfortable with. His eyes were green and piercing. Steve shook his head. “I’m not interested. I’m just trying to get home.”

“You don’t have a home. And it’s a very interesting job if you hear me out.”

“Look, Mr. Coal’s already spoken to me. I told him I’d think about it. Just not yet. I’ve got more important things to do right now, thank you.”

The man grinned like a shark through his twisted lips. 

“Oh, I don’t work with Mr. Coal. I represent an entirely separate organization, Captain." He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket with long white fingers and withdrew a business card. It flipped, and flashed between his fingers for a moment. "My party is interested in your strength of character, and your. Well, your strength. I’d like to give you a purpose in this strange, new world.”

He handed the card to Steve. It was plain matte white, and just said "Smith”. There was a phone number underneath. 

“The world hasn’t changed that much,” said Steve. He settled back in his seat, and turned his gaze forward. “I’ll think about it.”

It wasn’t a long flight, but Steve fell asleep over Albany anyway. 

In Steve's dream he stood on a cliff top overlooking an enormous vista of golden fields and red rocks. It was massive, bigger than anything he'd ever seen, and completely unfamiliar. The sunlight was piercing white and cast the dark blue sky into high contrast that faded out into indistinct pale smears against the horizon, a million miles away. There was a haze of heat in the air that rippled and distorted the light.

"Now," said a voice behind him, "you must decide."

Steve turned. A man was sitting on the hot red rocks, brown chest bare and legs crossed into a pretzel, but also it wasn't a man, because it had the head and neck and feathers of an enormous bird. Its feathers were pure white, the beak: jet black and looking sharp enough to rip a man to shreds, glinting wickedly. Its head was like no other bald eagle Steve had ever seen, and he'd held at least two on his tour for press photos. 

It turned its head to the side and peered at him sharply with one blazing eye the color of lightning at night, and it had a long tuft of feathers at the crown of its enormous raptor head.

The white feathers faded into brown skin almost smoothly: although Steve could tell the difference between the two textures he could not seem to focus on the transition, so where the bird ended and the man began there was nothing to say they were not the same thing the whole time. 

"What is this place?" asked Steve, looking over his shoulder at the wheat green and sage blue and red rock expanse of wild land behind him.

"This is America," said the eagle man.

Steve stared. He had never seen America like that. For all that he'd been captain America, he'd spent more time in the filthy countryside of France than he'd ever spent on tour, and that had been little outside of concert halls and hotels. Never been in a city beside New York for more than a week in his whole life, except when he was at war.

He'd never seen the America that counted. It was like he'd just learned that the past life he remembered was just a lie, and the story was just in his head. His imagined view of America had been all cities and boroughs and people and noise, and that had been what he'd loved.

This was so much bigger though, and so much more, because this was the land that held those people, and without that land those people would never have been there to fight for.

“Decide quickly,” said the eagle man.

“What am I deciding?” asked Steve, still feeling overwhelmingly small. They were immensely high up. Steve crept closer to the edge. On that last mission with the Commandos, in the snowy mountain pass, they’d probably been that high up or more, but the world had been one huge blur of white against white. The only depth to the whole landscape was how far Bucky had fallen, and that could have been a hundred miles into the Earth for how far it had felt to Steve.

A low rumbling shook the ground, and around his feet tiny shards of rock and pebble jumped and shivered over the flat surface. It was coming up the side of the cliff, but when Steve leaned out to look, the angle was too severe, and he couldn’t see. It was getting closer, like it was climbing towards them.

Steve stepped back.

“This is the time,” muttered the eagle man. “You must decide your path, for you have two options before you and how you choose will shape the world,” he said, but he was gone when Steve turned around. There was something like a shadow on the rock where he had been, and it moved and flickered like it was cast by firelight, but the sun beat down steady and unrelenting.

There was an awful cracking noise, and the cliff began to break. 

As the rock crumbled away, the flint edge drawing closer and closer to his boot heels, Steve realize he only had two options: to fall or to jump. He took two steps back: as far as he could go, the cliff rose up behind him and the ground collapsed in front of him. He bent his knees and pushed off. 

Steve was never the kind to just let himself fall: if he had to go down, he'd go flying.

He woke up to the jolt and lurch of turbulence, and the unmistakable rumble of thunder. For a moment he was back on that flight with Peggy and Howard, slipping through darkness over Italy, the one that made him Captain America instead of a dumb caricature. There wasn’t going to be a great rescue at the end of this one though. They definitely wouldn’t let him jump out the window.

He blinked up at the tiny illustration of a seat-belt, illuminated to the sound of the cabin crew’s warning.

All around, Steve could hear agitation; children fussing, adults muttering, a woman a few rows back calming her companion who was having a panic attack. 

The man in the dark suit, with the dark hair and the dark smile, was not sitting in the window seat. Had he slipped past while Steve slept? There wasn’t any sign of him. Steve looked around, and felt the plane shudder.

The plane landed at JFK airport as night came on fully, rain shattering against the tiny plastic windows, smudging the lights of the runway into brightly colored blurs. Steve stood, and watched carefully the people grabbing their bags and wrestling with personal items, and lingering in the aisle.

He didn’t see the man in the dark suit again, even after the stewardesses began combing the rows for stray trash, and the last stragglers were ushered off.


End file.
